Shamanism is a dimension of human experience that can be found in every culture in any age.It can be observed in a variety of forms, ranging from a fundamental spontaneous experience, derivative culturally shared practices, or as veiled motifs of spiritual, medical, artistic, scientific, and psychotherapeutic interventions.

Paradoxically, as shamanism becomes more culturally shared, it may become less authentic—less culturally challenging—and degenerative.Provoked by an experience of everyday life as a sort of “half-truth,” shamanism is a method that focuses on the erroneous belief in a separation of human life from nature.Shamanism focuses specifically on remaining alert to the creatural dimensions of human life that can be overridden by cultural, socio-psychological dimensions of everyday life.

Shamanism is an expression of an enduring wild state to remain alert to the changing conditions of existence and integrate into the natural world that continues to design and express human life across the long run.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Shamanism may be the oldest human healing art. This ancient way offers the modern “peopled”
Earth a primary healing resource rather than a secondary archaic remnant. Fundamental shamanism aspires to “heal”
by integration with cosmic forces that continue to design human life rather
than by manipulation.

1. Fundamental Shamanism

IN THE REAL WORK [p.10], Gary Snyder defines the “modern” timeframe as the
last two thousand years rather than by time frames such as “20th
Century” or by concepts tied to material development such as “post-industrial”
or by ideological concepts such as “post-modern” or “civilized.” In fact, this paper finds an eternal
enduring continuity, and posits an enduring “wild state” that continues rather
unchanging from ancient times into the post-modern era that offers a resource
for self and society. This wild
state emerges spontaneously as a state of alertness to the conditions of
existence so that human life can bring itself into harmony with those
conditions. The “wild state”
recognizes that we continue to be designed by and continue to be an expression
of the larger Earth ecosystem no matter how distant we feel. This state recognizes that we are both
very young in the history of the Earth and that we are lost deeply in stellar
evolution rather than separate. This
wild state is essentially creatural rather than psychological or cultural and
involves experiences of events in the landscape, such as water and wind and
plants, as being within one’s identity.
The term, “beingness,” describes a larger dimension beyond personality
and society that contains the creatural or totemic nature of human life.

Searching for “shamanism” in both “developed”
and indigenous contemporary societies, the visible shamanism is likely to be
cultural rather than creatural, and more homocentric than cosmic. In Shamanism, Mircea Eliade argues that shamanism may “degenerate” or
weaken as it becomes more culturally elaborated to serve cultural rather than
creatural or cosmic needs. The
practices tend to be shared throughout the culture or subculture when they
begin to address personal needs more than when they challenge personal and
cultural interests. In societies
where shamanism a visible practice, Eliade notes that the contemporary
shamanism may be described by societal members as being less powerful than the
original shamanism of that society.

“Shamanic societies” may be more
nature-oriented than other societies, but not necessarily nature-sensitive,
especially when faced with population pressures and now-global interpenetration
by other societies. Natural events
such as forest ecosystems or specific biota take on meaning that is specific to
the culture rather than universal, and it often begins to reinforce cultural
actions that are anthropocentric, rather than Earth-centric and culturally-challenging. The odds are strong that cultural
support for shamanism in a society that one might describe as shamanic is a
measure of cultural manipulation to serve orthodox cultural traditions and
personal needs rather than serve the larger Earth ecosystem. Often, practices that are identified as
“shamanism” may describe shamanistic elements that are secondary “motifs” of
religious practices and folk healing.
“Shamanic practices” may be reactionary movements that are religious in
nature that incorporate shamanic motifs to challenge to the dominant social
order within the culture more than they aspire to serve the larger Earth
ecosystem.

Western passion for shamanism due
to a sense of something missing in post-modern life can unintentionally
contribute to the degeneration of the fundamental shamanic experience by
adopting non-Western practices.
Western “shamanism” does typically describe practices that derive from
within Western culture, becaue it misses the presence of shamanic experience
within Western culture. Adoption
of non-Western practices and Western “shamanic tourism” can be a form of
cultural robbery as well as contribute to the degradation of shamanism into a “business.”

The “ancient” shamanism that endures
in any age and in any culture is a fundamental, acultural, personal experience
that tends to be eventually limited rather than strengthen by cultural
elaboration and support. The
enduring shamanism aspires to remain a method of access rather than a belief
system, and so it continually critiques itself in order to remain fresh an
alert.

Fundamental shamanism is an action-state, that of shamanizing, and resists becoming a derivative cultural “ism.” Fundamental shamanism attends to
the non-cultural, creatural dimensions of human life–seasons and weathers, the
waters, flora and fauna, the landform and stars. Fundamental shamanism serves the larger Earth ecosystem
rather than a personal quest or societal goal. Fundamental shamanism does aspire to optimize human life by aspiring to inform human life of the primary impact of these dimensions on human life. Fundamental shamanism experiences
[rather than believes in] human health as continuing to be primarily a
creatural rather than a cultural process.
From this perspective, optimal human health requires attentiveness to
the large conditions of existence both on a personal and societal level. When this attentiveness is lessened,
the quality of human life is degraded.

2. Toward a Strategy of Residency

TWO THOUSAND years of modernity
and tens of thousands of years of cultural emergence do not override hundreds
of thousands of years of emergence as species sapiens. While
contemporary urban life may seem nearly separate and above nature, human life
is still young in the life of the Earth, and perhaps even neonatal and far from
mature. Instead of being
distinct from nature, our most rational measures reveal that human life remains
deeply inside nature so that there is, remarkably, less of a distinction
between culture and nature.

This is not to say that modern
human life is much the same as ancestral human life. The contemporary condition of existence might be said to be
a “post-natural” one in which human life now modifies all landscapes, and
landscapes, in turn, feedback degrading environmental quality on a global
scale. Now, having peopled the
Earth with no remaining physical frontiers, our longstanding strategy of pioneering appears to be in need of transformation to a strategy of residency. The stored
capital of vast physical frontiers has allowed us to delude ourselves with as
sense of dominion over nature as our way forward. Now we are beginning to understand that human life remains
significantly creatural and requires attention to events beyond culture to meet
our most practical interests and not simply our aesthetic interests if we are
to optimize the quality of human life for the short run and perhaps to sustain
for the long run as a species. As
wild creatures, modern human life needs methods to continue to remain wildly
alert to the conditions of existence.

3.
Shamanism as a Method for Accessing a Wild State

FROM A SHAMANIC perspective, there
is no distinction between nature and culture. Like a flower, human life is experienced to be inseparable
from wind and water and mineral.
And so, in any age, it is essential to access events beyond culture both
for optimal health and basic survival.

In contemporary life, science is
very effective at attending to or measuring many aspects of natural phenomena
that impact upon everyday life.
Still, a dimension of human experience that comes to be termed shamanism
spontaneously arises. This
experience is two-fold. First,
there is an experience of one’s everyday life as an incomplete experience of
reality at best. This experience
is explored by many practices other than shamanism, including formal religion,
varieties of spiritual expression, psychic and metaphysics, and even our most
rational measures of scientific inquiry.
However, shamanism is differentiated by its emphasis upon the experience
of being a “creature” or a human “wild state” that attends to acultural events
such as trees and wind as primary reaches of self that design human life. In the experience of shamanizing, the
voice of landscape is experienced as inside one’s personal identity.

The self or personality that can
emerge from shamanic methods is a “wild” or, more accurately, totemic identity.
That is to say, a person’s working/conscious identity includes elemental
events beyond culture as primary facets to be attended to if health is to be
optimal.

From a shamanic perspective, the
exclusion of acultural events from identity limits rather than optimizes the
quality of human life and places long-run sustainability at risk.

In shamanic experiences, human
life derives from landscape—from beyond self and culture. The living, vital shamanism
inescapably is a fundamental, uncompromising method that challenges
culture. For example, an
early shamanism of a coastal society might challenge the community to reexamine
its exploitation of the nearby sea and impose self-limits as a solution to the
reduced quality of a fishery. The “ancient”
shamanic way authentically endures as beyond culture, fundamental more than
derivative, and creatural. At its
most authentic, shamanic method aspires to bring human life into harmony with
its larger, inescapable, inseparable creatural dimensions that are present in
any era.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

MANY PRACTICES AND BELIEFS can be associated with shamanism
to the degree that the term “shamanism” becomes nearly meaningless.Like “spirit” and “soul” and
“being-ness,” “shamanism” has become an inclusive, encompassing term rather
than a distinguishing term, and sort of a "pop" term.That
is likely because it touches many aspects of human life, especially those naturalist aspects for which we continue to hunger and to connect with, involving aspects of
modern life that go unrecognized as having anything to do with “primitive”
shamanism.

Shaman’s Grace argues
that there is a dimension of human experience that occurs in every society in
every era that involves attending to an enduring wild state, wherein human life
continues to be primarily creatural rather than cultural or social or
psychological.From the emergence of human life [species sapiens] to the most post-industrial cybernetic moment, shamanism has
proffered a way to "see in the dark"—a way to touch something deep inside us,
which is rock-firm reality, that listens to the changing conditions of existence while we are half-awake
in our everyday.Seemingly
primitive and superstitious, shamanism is a core yet effusive aspect of modern
medicine, art, psychotherapy, and science.But to most of the modern world, shamanism describes
practices found in Third World developing nations and Fourth World indigenous
societies that are superstitious and manipulative. And to a very real extent, that is true. They are not stuck in the primal as much as "modern," but utilizing the resources that are available to them.

Shaman’s Grace
focuses on an enduring fundamental experience that is quickly co-opted into
derivative forms, both explicit traditional and hidden modern expressions, that
reinforce culture, that are manipulative and superstitious, rather than that
challenge culture.

This more “fundamental [un-co-opted] shamanism” is increasingly of value in a now peopled Earth with no vast
frontiers.This is co-opting of
fundamental experience is common to all experience, including our most rational
scientific measures, but is especially present in addressing “spiritual” experience. Religions continually undergo "reformation," and so science, and our most practical, everyday routines. Now, each decade--not each century--is radically altered.

Shaman’s Grace
describes a fundamental enduring human response that is present
in any society in any era that is distinguished from the popular association of
shamanism as a derivative indigenous practice
of contacting spirits and strengthening self. Its methods are the conscious expression of an enduring wild
state that aspires to align us with the vast conditions of existence that have
designed us, and that continue to design us.

In this fundamental
shamanism, all experiences that optimize human life are envisioned to be, astonishingly, a
creatural process—rather than a psychological or cultural process.And shamanism focuses on the central
human characteristic of imagination.Every second of human life involves a stream of imagination.Imagination uses momentary experiences
to aspire to access billions-years-old experiences that are contained within
our eloquent physiological-eco design.Like scientific inquiry, this fundamental shamanism requires a self-critical
approach, with the expectation that layers of cultural bias must be looked for,
rather a trust that one’s "shamanic experiences" are somehow exempt from scrutiny, and automatically
authentic.We are anthropocentric,
presuming that we have come into the Earth and will leave it in death, and in
this sense, we—in our most post-industrial, cybernetic essence--remain “primitive”
or perhaps “ignorant,” or perhaps—more-accurately—neonatal [more accurate:
neotenic], in our development as a species. We are "nasty" in our sense of import, killing both the human and the natural world. For all of our modernity, we remain so very, very young in the history of the Earth, as well as
fragile. We have barely appeared in geo-time, and are at risk of disappearing far to fast.

Shamanism is a method far more than a belief system, a practice
of using deep imagination to touch the imaginal—something profoundly deep and authentic rather than something
imaginary, in the sense of being fantasy or wished-for-to integrate with the
natural process of the Earth and cosmos.

IN
EVERY SOCIETY, from aboriginal through postmodern, there are times when human
imagination is experienced as accessing a voice that is no longer exclusively
either “inner” or fantasy. This
voice is inherent in the serendipitous breakthroughs of our most rational,
objective measures in science—“double helix,” and sub-nuclear “quark” “flavors”
of “Strange” and “Charm,” and “leptons” of “Tau,” and “gravitrons” of “W” and
“Z” bosons, and 8 “gluons.” These
terms are ways of saying that which we know to be real, but that we also
acknowledge that our existing lexicon—our eco-literacy—must grow into it.

We
are young in the Earth, and for all of our advancements, we try to imagine our
world with a still-developing tri-cameral brain. We tend to take our experience apart to sustain. We are not very good at seeing
whole. We see, for example,
ecology; how a tree collects the energy of a star, but we tend to
compartmentalize “tree” and “star,” because we can measure “parts” more than
processes that interpenerate “parts.”

In
the archaic past, in primal societies, wholeness and integration and
inseparability were intuitively sensed.
But often these experiences seemed “spiritual,” which was different that
“objective” or “rational,” and, therefore, esoteric at best, and, perhaps, delusional
and misleading when we believe in them rather than remain self-critical and
open.

From
archaic times through the present moment, there has always been an enduring
sense that everyday life can become a half-life, a dream of reality rather than
reality as it is. And there can be
this sense that such a walking dream state can be not only less satisfying, but
also dangerously illusive in the way in which it islands and disconnect. And there have always been a variety of
responses including shamanism.

The
range of human experiences that come to be termed “shamanism” offer attention
to the “creatural” dimension of human life that might be associated in modern
life with ecological orientations such as “deep ecology” and “eco-psychology”
or “transpersonal ecology.” But
these are still not “shamanism.”
In a cybernetic, electronic age, shamanism is distinguished from these
orientations in that it concentrates attention on imaginal methods rather than explicit facts. And in the post-modern, cybernetic age,
to be both creatural and imaginal seemed to be the antithesis of the essence of
“modern.”

However,
shamanism continues to offer modern life a method to address the dilemmas of
human existence through

• the
demolition of perceptual barriers, so that

• the
uncategorizable elements of reality emerge in a mythic language, [not unlike
metaphors in science] that may

• reveal
information to optimize a response to the dilemmas of existence,

• to
restore harmony between everyday and vaster, non-sensory dimensions of reality.

What
will be needed if shamanism is to contribute to any society is a self-critical
attitude, but also, a continuing challenge to culture [as science does
challenging its own theories rather than degenerating into a reinforcement of
culture]?